Currently reading the Pope's Love & Responsibility, a wonderful tonic for the sexual ethic quagmire:
"Beauty is essentially an object of contemplative cognition, and to experience aesthetic values is not to exploit..Thus sensuality really interferes with apprehension of the beautiful, even of bodily, sensual beauty for it introduces a consumer attitude to the object; 'the body' is then regarded as a potential object of exploitation."
"[The sexual life process] has not a consumer orientation - nature does not have enjoyment for its own sake as its aim."
"The sexual urge in man is a fact which he must recognize and welcome as a source of natural energy - otherwise it may cause pyschological disturbances. The instinctive reaction in itself, which is called sexual arousal, is to a large extent a vegetative reaction independent of the will...An exuberant and readily roused sensuality is the stuff from which a rich - if difficult - personal life may be made. It may help the individual to respond more readily and completely to the decisive elements in personal love. Primitive sensual excitability (provided it is not of morbid origin) can become a factor making for a fuller and more ardent love. Such a love will obviously be the result of sublimination."
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